The real irony of all this is that the people being genocides right now in Gaza have a much closer genetic relationship to the actual human beings who wrote the Torah than those who are genociding them. We’re watching the actual descendents of the ancient Israelites being exterminated right now.

On the other hand, there have been Jewish states before modern Israel, and it always ended in tears. Maybe believing that you’re God’s chosen people inevitably causes you to act with an arrogance and belief in your own invincibilty that eventually causes your country to be destroyed. If you believe God literally wants you to have a piece of dirt, why practice good diplomacy and have good relations with your neighbors? Your only concern is keeping God happy. In the Old Testament, the Israelites suffered invasion only when they somehow let God down. With that as your cultural foundation, what does that do to your nation’s foreign policy?

Part of me really is starting to wonder if giving folks who think they’re God’s special chosen people was a terrible mistake.

It could be carbon neutral. It’s all about how you do it.

And what’s wrong with that? Who says the coal has to be a net source of power?

Synthetic fuels are actually a pretty viable method of decarbonizing, especially for hard-to-decarbonize applications like aviation. Sure, you don’t get net energy out of them, but who cares? Thanks to dirt cheap solar, our civilization has stupidly abundant access to energy. It’s only portable energy or energy when we want it that costs a lot. But people have seriously proposed making even gasoline from atmospherically derived carbon. Sure, it’s just a fancy battery. But the Joules/dollar you get from the grid is so much cheaper than what you get from gasoline that it may be worth it.

In theory, you could make a carbon-neutral coal-burning steam locomotive. You would need to make synthetic coal out of atmospherically-captured CO2. But in theory it would be possible…

If I ran a business, I wouldn’t engage in any political events whatsoever.

So you won’t have holidays, period.

space is infinite, and as such, infinite growth is possible

• A finite portion of the universe is within our cosmological horizon. The universe is in fact not infinite.

• The speed of light (the speed of causality) places hard limits on over what distances economies can operate on an interstellar scale.

• Interstellar travel is not a solution to population growth and resource depletion, as it costs orders of magnitude more energy to ship someone across interstellar distances than to keep them alive for millennia at absurd comfort levels.

• You can keep your economy localized and instead go out and grab resources from distant Suns, but that has real diminishing returns. And if you cram too much matter in too small a volume of space, you cook your civilization in its own waste heat or collapse it into a black hole.

Space travel, especially interstellar space travel, is not a cheat code to infinite resources. Colonizing distant stars is more like throwing seeds into the wind than it is extending your own civilization by settling the next valley over. When you start an interstellar colony, you’re founding a new civilization, and ultimately a new species, not building an extension to your own. The speed of causality demands this.

Sure, you can hand waive these concerns away by speculating about faster than light travel. But at that point, you might as well be arguing that we’ll solve all our resource problems by building a perpetual motion machine. If you can build one, you can build the other.

Ironically, the building on the right is not from forgetting their place in the fast food chain. Rather, it’s from remembering and embracing their real place in the chain. McDonalds isn’t a fast food company; it’s a real estate company. That’s where their real money is made. They build restaurants in high traffic areas with growing economies. They make some money from food sales, but the real long-term profits are from value of the land and the market value of the building.

The reason that all restaurants have become so bland and boring is that in the drive to pursue efficiency above all else, fast food companies have started optimizing their buildings for resale value. A building with really distinctive architecture - like an old Pizza Hut - doesn’t have good resale value. You either keep using it as a Pizza Hut, or you rent it out for a greatly reduced rent.

A McDonalds that is just a big bland box has more book value than a McDonalds that has a play place. Very few potential renters want a play place or the architecture to accommodate one. If McDonalds needs to close one of their restaurants and rent out or sell the old building, one without a play place will hold its value better.

McDonalds is a real estate company, not a burger company. That’s finally shown up in their actual architectural design.

Companies in the US have merged and merged, becoming ever larger. Most industries are dominated by 2 or 3 companies. And private equity firms own a staggering portion of the economy. As these companies become larger and larger, they start behaving more and more like Soviet central planners. Cheap efficiency at all cost. Standardization in all things. Minimum viable product.

I have actually had this exact book as a text in one of my courses. I have a copy literally within arms reach of where I’m typing this.

I mean, I don’t know what else one would expect.

Oh, hey, it’s Pseudotsuga menziesii.

To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.

Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.

As long as the tanker weights less than the weight of all that water it displaced, it will float.

But that’s only because of the spell that the ancient Wizard Archimedes cast in the elder days. Archimedes didn’t discover his principle, he molded reality to follow his rule.

Sorry. It’s real but gay. Nothing as phallic as an airliner can be straight.

I want my state, a smaller blue state, to start using this same logic. Namely, I think we should, using donor cells and cloning techniques, arrange to have 100 million frozen embryos sitting in freezers in the state capital. Logically, if embryos are people, then those 100 million embryos should count as citizens for the sake of Congressional representation and federal funding.

The Trump regime is rightfully infamous for their major crimes. But like any villain, they commit crimes both major and minor.

Among the minor crimes of the Trump regime is that I as an American can no longer tease Germans about the Nazis.

First, that is an extremely bad-faith interpretation of my words, and you know it.

Second, historically, when countries face autocratic moments like ours, often the only way they out the autocrat is by completely abandoning the corrupt center-left party that allowed and enabled the far right authoritarians. Voters often spend several election cycles fruitlessly trying to get the center-left party to make the necessary changes to challenge the autocrat. In the end, the center left party loses more and more popularity, until it collapses completely. Their credibility is mud with the general populace; they simply have no viable path to winning an election. The party needs to collapse into nothing. Only then is there enough room for a new party that can actually challenge the autocrat to rise. They try several cycles of dutifully voting for the center-left corporate party, but it just doesn’t work. In the end they just have to let it burn.

Centrist Dems are not going to be able to defeat Trumpism. And this inability also makes them incredibly weak candidates to win elections against Trumpism. If the DNC is going to just keep forcing useless ineffectual centrists on the party, really, the quickest way to defeat MAGA will be for as many Democrats to abandon the Democratic Party and vow to never vote for them again. Centrist dems will just keep losing election after election after election. They’re losers. Weak, ineffectual losers. They can’t win elections against Trump. Biden only managed to eek out a win in 2020 due to Covid.

If Dems are going to keep forcing corporate centrists through, you are actually delaying the defeat of Trumpism by voting for them. As corporate Dems can’t win a general election against Trumpism, voting for them is as completely pointless as voting for third party candidates in 2024. Centrist Dems just aren’t serious presidential contenders anymore; you shouldn’t take them seriously. A vote for a centrist Dem is a vote for another MAGA term. Even if a corporate Dem gets the nomination, a vote for them is still a vote for a longer MAGA reign.

If they force another corporate centrist through in 2028, the 2028 election is already lost. At that point, the goal should be to make sure that the corporate candidate loses spectacularly. The corporate Dem is never going to win, but they might eek out a 45-55 loss that lets the DNC keep pretending that corporate Dems have a chance at winning the general election. At that point, with the election already lost, the goal should be to make sure the centrist Dem loses by an overwhelming, comically large 30-70 margin or similar. You need to take so much credibility from the Dems that the party collapses completely.

We’re in a fight that is going to take more than one election cycle. Accept that now. You need to think more strategically than just one election cycle in the future. Because “vote blue no matter who” can actually extend the reign of the MAGA movement.

Hopefully we won’t get stuck with a shithead corporate centrist in 2028. But if we do, I’ll be boycotting the presidential general election, only voting in the Congressional elections. I do this because I care about the country, and I want to see MAGA defeated as quickly as possible. If a corporate Dem is the nominee in 2028, then Dems have already lost the election. At that point, your thoughts should immediately move to 2032, as that will be the next chance Dems have at ousting MAGA.